Meet the Team
Born from an idea in the wintery North, we’ve been embraced by Java nation anywhere we go. Every day, our customers add chapters to the ZeroTurnaround story. And every day, dozens of crazy-smart people in our team work hard to ensure that the story is a blast. Here are their humble ambassadors.
EXECUTIVE TEAM
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Jevgeni Kabanov
Founder & CEO
Jevgeni first wrote the JRebel prototype in 2007 when he served as R&D director at Webmedia. His insight? Tackling Java’s core problem: the redeployment bottleneck. This led to a start-up and two products that smart Java teams wouldn’t be caught without.
Jevgeni splits his time between ZeroTurnaround’s offices around the globe, keeping the company’s core instincts razor-sharp. You can spot him online and at international conferences where he talks about classloaders and ZeroTurnaround in Java Development in many international conferences.
He is also the co-founder of 2 open-source projects: Aranea and Squill.
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Toomas Römer
Founder, Director of Engineering
Toomas was a R&D specialist in Webmedia and has been the core developer for ZeroTurnaround’s product since 2007.
He is a big fan of JUG communities and he contributes to the open-source Aranea Web Framework.
In his spare time he crashes Lexus’ while test driving them, plays chess and Go or maybe some Starcraft.
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Alex Laats
President and COO
Alex has 20+ years of experience as a tech entrepreneur, business operator, and team builder.
Before joining ZeroTurnaround, he created Boomerang, RAMP, and AVOKE, and acquired Digital Force Technologies) while serving as president of BBN Technologies’ Delta Division. BBN is legendary in the geek world for many things, including the development of the early internet nodes and the invention of email.
Prior to BBN, Alex co-founded two businesses, including NBX, one of the first successful enterprise VoIP businesses.
Alex walks a fine line of geek and businessman while still maintaining his title as four square (the schoolyard game) legend. In the short-guy, over-40 category, that is.
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Riina Einberg
General Manager, Estonian Operations
Riina has literally had the privilege of living in IT and Internet history by facilitating Internet uptake in Estonia, participating in developing Estonian e-government, and by helping Skype grow from a small to mid size company.
Her secret formula for exceptional organization is a good company structure, hiring dedicated persons, helping individuals understand themselves, what they want, all while using brutal honesty.
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Jeremy Lopez
Marketing Director
Jeremy comes from the online advertising and data intelligence industries where he harvested his love for data driven marketing.
He embraces the marketing philosophy “a good product + good marketing = happy customers, but a great product + great marketing = a true relationship” which was met with open arms at ZeroTurnaround.
Jeremy still aspires to be a geek but doesn’t think that code writing is in his future.
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Ethan Schechter
Sales Director
Ethan uses an enthusiastic sales methodology by building relationships and leading by example. His eclectic sales background includes enterprise data storage, social media, financial services, and information technology.
Ethan looks to provide value to metrics-based sales by presenting them with great technology and the resources and planning to implement them effectively.
He has been able to accomplish extraordinary results in the course of his sales career, giving it all each step of the way. He enables the sales dream to become the foundation to success.
FROM THE FRONTLINES
Product Management Team
led by Founder and CEO Jevgeni Kabanov
This team is responsible for our product vision, roadmap and releases.
Building products is tough. You need to know the community, understand the businesses, come up with unorthodox solutions, and make sure your voice gets heard. We listen, we talk, we write, we plan, we think. Most importantly, we ship.
JRebel Engineering Team
run by Team Lead Sven Laanela and Product Lead Anton Arhipov
JRebel is the core of our business and we are the engine that keeps the JRebel train running. We develop new features for JRebel and add support for newer versions of various frameworks and application servers. We also provide technical support to our customers and collaborate with the sales team by working our product-demo magic. You’ll also find us evangelizing JRebel at Java conferences all over the solar system.
It takes a certain kind of individual to be a part of the JRebel Engineering team. You have to be (or have the potential to become) a rockstar when it comes to Java development. The problems that we tackle require a deep understanding of the Java ecosystem and often require digging deep into the internals of frameworks and application servers. Being interested in how things work internally is a must when it comes to working at ZT.
That said, you don’t have to be hard-core with a disassembler and be prepared to take apart HotSpot in 30 seconds. The main development work is still done in Java. Just be prepared to get more intimate with Java corner cases and mysteries. If you feel light years ahead of your peers when it comes to mad Java skillz, keep us in mind.
LiveRebel Engineering Team
led by Team Lead Anna Agafonova and Product Lead Neeme Praks
We do not just dully implement tasks. We take it to heart that we create the best product possible and accept no half-assed solutions. Besides product development (and improving the development process itself), everyone on the engineering team is actively involved in customer communication, sales demos, and conference talks.
We believe in proactive communication. Many potential problems get solved even before arising just because we talk to each other. Everyone on the team has really outstanding and shiny personality, and it’s the only kind of people we hire. Do you juggle rubber ducks? Act as stand-up comedian? Recreationally kill vampires? Now we’re talking!
Infrastructure Team
led by Aivar Avalo
This small team is responsible for building and maintaining our front- and backend services: billing, licensing, reporting, sales and marketing. Fighting evil and herding kittens are also high on the priority list. Our virtual server farm consists of 50+ machine kittens already, both in the cloud and on the ground. We’re here to keep them purring, happy and without bad sectors.
We work closely with system owners and services administrators from our engineering and business teams in Tallinn/Tartu, Boston and Prague. This means we can’t afford to be Bastard Operators from Hell, but are rather friendly folks who get things done with a smile.
Marketing Team
led by Jeremy Lopez
We do not play by the rules of conventional marketing with endless commercials, repeated concepts, and false promises. We want to feed our current, past and potential clients with valuable information that they can learn from and pass along to others.
Our enthusiasm and passion towards collaboration has helped us build strong relationships. Marketing’s first deliverable is that partnership. Such convergence of data and creative has allowed us to develop a marketing style that is successful and welcomed within our geek community.
ZT’s marketing team is driven by inbound marketing. We love content, conferences, media buying, tweeting, facebooking, myspacing(?) and well pretty much anything that will introduce our products to the Java ecosystem. We are not interested in bombarding people with nonsense. We have a product that is simply the best, so what you see is what you get.
Sales Team
led by Ethan Schechter
Imagine an atmosphere where you are welcomed, if not encouraged, to be the happiest, most enthusiastic, driven self you can possibly be. This is the foundation for ZT’s sales team. Here it’s common to blast your favorite song, blow a horn, or play a match of ping pong when you close a deal.
We are lucky to be surrounded by people with incredible ambitions and exceptional characters in our sales force. We expect our crew to work as hard as they can. In reward we will provide you with the most lovable and dynamic work environment you can think of, which comes natural to us.
We have a product that simple is the best at what it does… Our job is to spread the word, so more companies can increase the productivity of their developers—an attainable goal that we keep exceeding year after year. With the vision of our sales guru, Ethan Schechter, we continue to grow while having ridiculous fun.
General Administration
led by Alex Laats and Riina Einberg
With a small global general management, finance and office management team, we make sure that
- our plans are ambitious and challenging
- our books and balance sheet are crisp and clear, with reports and statistics ready for big decisions
- we recruit the brightest and most dedicated people and develop awesome teams
- we have a warm, whimsical and caring environment at our offices in Tartu, Tallinn, Boston and Prague
- our folks travel safely and comfortably
- our events and parties are well prepared and awesome
You might find many of these things at other companies, but you won’t find an opportunity to express your creativity like you can at ZeroTurnaround, while collaborating with a great and rapidly growing team. Our team keeps everything efficient and effective, but also fun and informal.
JOIN THE TEAM